


Washed Clean

by Delphi



Category: Magnificent Seven (TV)
Genre: Bathing/Washing, M/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-28
Updated: 2010-08-28
Packaged: 2017-10-11 07:10:08
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/109801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A trio of vignettes featuring Ezra/Nathan/Josiah in their various couplings.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Washed Clean

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Kink Bingo 2010. Kink: _Washing/Cleaning_

**Ezra: Sober**

He dragged Josiah up to his room by the collar like a reluctant schoolboy and paused just long enough to pull off the man's boots and gun belt before shoving him into the washtub. It was last night's bath water, and it hadn't even been hot enough then.

Josiah sputtered but submitted to it, looking as properly sorry as the drunk he was.

"You, sir," Ezra snapped, "are an idiotic, imbecilic _inebriate_!"

Josiah seemed to consider that muzzily. "Only a little."

Ezra pinched the bridge of his nose. "I suppose, then, that you were only making a _little_ spectacle of yourself out in the thoroughfare. And you were only about to get yourself a _little_ stabbed."

He rolled up his sleeves in irritation and grabbed the soap and scrub brush. His esteem for Josiah was, at the best of times, rather high. Too high. That was why he hated seeing him like this.

"You smell like a still," he muttered darkly, working roughly at the sodden clothes and scrubbing hard at whatever skin he could bare. It wasn't until he reached the man's placket that he realized Josiah was enjoying this a little too much.

He paused. He snorted. "Idiot," he said again.

Josiah grinned and pulled him in.

 

**Nathan: Sterile**

Nathan had long since decided that some of the most dangerous things in the world were invisible. Take hatred, or jealousy, or prejudice. You could see the mark they left, all right, but you couldn't hold them in your hand. They had no weight, no smell, no taste. Sickness was the same. Call it miasma or call it germs, but whatever invisible speck of dirt made for blood poisoning could kill a man long after a big old .38 bullet had failed to do the job.

He slowly wiped the dried blood from Ezra's wound with a warm, wet cloth. The motion soothed him; touching Ezra's bare skin had come to mean something else entirely these days. Back and forth, careful, gentle, as Ezra slept off the rest of the ether. He cleaned him until the cloth was rusty and Ezra's skin was clean, and then he painted the edges of the wound with iodine and kept watch over the next several hours as the angry red lines around it slowly retreated, leaving pink skin in its wake.

He wanted to touch it—to put his mouth against it—but who knew where that speck of dirt came from? So he got himself another washcloth, and he got back to work.

 

**Josiah: Saved**

The first time it was something more than lending a hand in the dark was when he and Nathan ended up in the little river that ran behind his pile of bricks in the wilderness. Nathan had kindly come by to help him dig a foundation, and the two of them had gotten so hot and dusty that there was nothing for it but a dip in the water.

They weighed their clothes down with a stone on the bank and waded in. The water was cool, only up to their waists at its deepest, and the sun was blazing above them. He looked over as Nathan rinsed off, admiring the long, smooth lines of him and the way his nipples had gone tight.

There was something about running water, something that carried a man's sins and worries away downriver.

Nathan caught him staring. "What?"

Josiah let a grin slowly unfold.

Nathan's eyes narrowed. "Uh-uh. No how. You'll get us hanged."

They ended up half-beached on the bank anyhow, hands and mouths moving urgently, trying to be quick, trying to be quiet. The sun beat down on his back, and he could feel Nathan's heart beating hard through his chest against him, and the water caressed him as it flowed on, cold and clean. It was almost enough to restore a man's faith in God.


End file.
